Tahrir Square: Men with Beards

Tahrir Square was packed Friday. The crowd was as large and dense, with as much pushing and shuffling and squeezing as I have seen since the night Mubarak fell. Most of those present were Islamists, with untrimmed beards and close-shaved mustaches, wearing white knit prayer caps or the red tarboosh and white turban of scholars from Al Azhar, Cairo’s venerable Islamic University. Many, perhaps most, had come from distant governorates, in buses organized by the Muslim Brotherhood and Salafist organizations and parties.

I had lunch in Café Riche, just off the Square, where journalists and intellectuals used to gather in the old days, when the fight was against the British and the monarchy. Naguib Mahfouz used to preside over a weekly salon, and newly released political prisoners would borrow money from the head waiter. There was a secret door behind the bar, for escapes into the alley during police raids. Writers and commentators still meet there on Fridays. As I arrived, a well-known political cartoonist with a great gray bushy beard was giving an interview to a TV reporter.

“The intellectuals have lost,” he said, as a march of chanting Islamists, fists raised, went by in the street outside on the way to Tahrir. “Look at this!”

As the cartoonist drew caricatures of people sitting around him, Hassan Ibrahim, a documentary producer for Al Jazeera, lamented that the Islamists were able to mass far greater numbers on the street than the liberals. “The liberals would never be able to match this,” he said. “They don’t have the money or the organization to get people out of their bars and their coffee shops and their pedantic discussions.”

“The Friday of Demand” was called to protest efforts by the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces to produce a template constitution that would secure its status (vetoing any civilian political control in matters of the military budget and of waging war), and to appoint the bulk of a committee to draft a new constitution. The original understanding, after Mubarak’s fall, had been that a new parliament would select the committee. The Islamists want to return to that plan, in part because they expect to do very well in the upcoming parliamentary elections; the Supreme Council doesn’t want to risk too much civilian interference; and the liberals, as usual, are torn between wanting to deny the Islamists influence and frustration with the Supreme Council’s agenda. About half of the liberal parties and movements stayed off of Tahrir Square Friday, and half encouraged their members to demonstrate.

On the square, I talked to Islamist lawyers and teachers, some from Cairo, some from Delta towns; some Salafists, some Muslim Brotherhood. They were committed to Sharia as the best way forward for Egypt, and they were all very much on message: the Supreme Council must hand over power to a civilian authority by April, 2012. Whenever I talk to Islamists, they are unfailingly friendly and are at pains to stress their respect for the Christian minority. (They do try to convert me, though.) When I press them on the question of just what their interpretation of Sharia would mean in terms of lifestyle choice, jurisprudence, and family law—alcohol, bikinis, divorce, cutting off hands for thieves—they hark back to historical examples of moderate Islamic reigns in India and Andalusia, and quote episodes from early Islamic conquests in which Islam was introduced gradually to new populations.

My liberal Egyptian acquaintances roll their eyes at America’s recent diplomatic, conciliatory remarks about working with moderate Islamists in the wake of the Arab Spring. “You can’t trust them,” they say. Some liberals have decided that it’s perhaps better to go along with the Supreme Council’s efforts to push through a preemptory Constitution, as an end-run around an Islamist-dominated parliament. Increasingly, Egyptian politics feels like a three-way tug of war.